by Edward James

Created on: May 18, 2010

I used to spend hours on the Amiga, and then later on the Super Nintendo playing Mortal Kombat (MK). Whilst most raved about Street Fighter I always thought that MK was where it was at. The characters were better, there was blood when you hit your opponent and the finishing moves ("fatalities") were brilliant. As the later versions came out instead of fatalities you could choose friendships, whereby you did something nice for your opponent, like danced for them or made them a paper chain or a magic trick, or you could do the babality and turn them in to a child. MK3 had the additional finishing move of animalaties whereby your character turned in to an animal and did something crazy to your opponent. Trying to work out the combination of the fatalities, friendships, babalities and animalities was a challenge and quite often we had to resort to the many cheat magazines available.

Overall there are 19 characters including Skorpion, Jax, Lui Kang, Kung, Katana amongst all the other characters from the previous versions of MK. In my opinion UMK has the best characters with the best weapons, the best special moves and the best finishing moves (including the fatality, babality, animality and friendship) of any fighting game.

The characters are quite small as the producers have attempted to have cram in too much on the screen, which is a bit of a shame. Personally, I would have increased the size, and definition of the characters, at the expense of the detailed backgrounds.

All characters have the jump kick, high kick, low kick, sweeping kick, high punch, low punch and upper cut ability. In addition, each character has its own signature moves that can be used to great effect. The characters are moved during the D pad and the A, B, X and Y buttons. In addition, the L and R shoulder buttons are used. During game play the inactive top screen shows your character's special moves, which is very useful especially if you have a poor memory and cannot remember them very easily. It also displays the finishing moves so there is no need to go out and buy any magazines for the cheats.

The touch screen facility is redundant in this game, which does not surprise me. I am struggling to see how you would actually have a game of this genre using the full potential of the touch screen and stylus. Like previous versions of MK the action is fast and furious and the single bouts can be over in a matter of seconds. Once you are subjecting your opponent to close in fast punches it is difficult

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